Near and Far: Sence of Place vis-a-vis Necessity for Cultural Translation

Against the grain of the more wide-spread belief in globalization as a process that hardly knows any borders at all goes the everyday experience in places that are on the margins of the historical centers of economic, political, social and cultural accumulation. As Ranciere notices, there are preconditions for the distribution of the visible as it presents itself in public space. Taken and read globally, a geography of hot and cold zones of globalization emerges where destination and fly-over cities for cultural events inadvertently map each other with the tight web of relations of recognition and neglect, relevance and irrelevance, and being in touch and disconnectedness. Even vehicular languages have not only their history but also geography of effective use while the latter fractally ramifies all the way down to the smallest elements of urban space. In cities that suddenly became transcoded from protocols of open social access to differentiated economic availability the phenomenon of collective and individual falling out of the networks and infrastructures of the networks of translocal cultural, economic and social access forms urban landscapes anew according to an emergent logic of relations of neo-dependency and post-independence where the hightened value of vehicular media, such as language, internet and institutions, distributes what is visible and invisible in novel ways.